Today was bike test day.  Normally I test my bike power, using a common 20 minute FTP test.  Today however, I did the Four-Dimensional Power Test designed by the Sufferfest and Wahoo.  This test evaluates power using four different metrics.  I will go into the theory of the test in more detail on a future blog. For today’s blog however, I will just walk you though how the test went for me.

I loaded the test workout into TrainerRoad and set up to do the test.  What was interesting was that, when I went to do the test, the TrainerRoad software suggested the workout was “Not Recommended”!!   I obviously ignored that and did the test anyway…

The first part of the test is an easy 10 minute warm up followed by a small ramp up of 2 minutes intervals (you can see the test profile in the photo above).  I was surprised during the ramp part of the test this morning, how dead my legs were feeling. This had me a little worried about what was to come.

The next part of the test involved two, five second sprints on two minutes rest.  I felt like I nailed this part of the test and I did.  I beat my previous all-time five second power number by 120W.  

After another two minute recovery, came the five minute interval.  This was the interval that I executed poorly today.  The goal was to maintain the maximum power that I could hold, for 5 minutes.  I started off way too hard, and found that after two minutes, I faded quite badly.  After fading, I was in a poor mental place, but somehow managed to push hard again. Again I faded after a minute or so.  One last effort to increase power, got me to the end of the five minutes.  The end result was not bad, but I do feel I could have done better with better pacing of my effort.

Next, was five minutes recovery, before a 20 minute FTP type test.  I was really pleased with how this went.  I picked a power to start at, that was quite high, and was able to maintain it for the full twenty minutes. In fact, I was able to increase the power slightly towards the end. The good news was this resulted in my best ever FTP by a couple of Watts.

The test ends with one more hard effort.  It was a one minute all out effort, done after ten minutes of recovery from the FTP portion.  This interval was crazy tough, and fatigue in my legs meant I found it hard to get through the full minute.  I faded badly again…

Overall, this is a great bike test, even if it is extremely challenging to complete.  I look forward to trying it again, some time in the future.